Part 24. Sound system

It’s kind of too cold to really do much with the car, so I have tried to find stuff that I can do indoors.

So, I have this old Philips casette recorder setup that I think would be just great for the car. It used to belong to my parents, they bought it in the seventies I think. So it’s a bit newer than the car… But way too cool not to be used!

I finally took the time and made a complete inventory of all parts and cables (took a while to find everything, but now it’s all safely stored in one place). I’m going to start testing everything pretty soon. It also needs a lot of cleaning and some minor fixing. Hopefully everything still works OK, but I’m pretty shure it can be fixed if something is broken (very simple technology).

It’s a weird setup. The cassette recorder/player is stored in this docking system that has a huge power switch on the right.

To change the cassette the whole unit is pulled forward from the docking bay.

Then you just push a button to open the cassette bay.

If you want to play a cassette, you push the middle switch up. To record you push and hold the orange button down and the push the middle switch up. The dial shows the input level of the mic (there is a plug for one!).
To wind or rewind the tape you push the middle switch sideways.

Ouput volume control and input level controls are on the left hand side of the unit.

Standard plugs… 30 years ago!

Oh, yes, if you want to listen to a radio, you need a separate unit (on top here). The casette player has a loudspeaker also, but if you want more output, it can be plugged to an amplifier. Like so:

So now you have a casette player with radio and an amplifier for a speaker. Yes, one speaker. It’s a MONO setup! 🙂

Here’s the way cool part:

You can remove the whole recorder unit from the docking unit to take it with you!

And you can use it without a power source with batteries.

The setup includes this nice leather shoulder case to carry it around in.

So, when I have it all nice and working properly, it will just be waiting get installed to the car.

As it is a mono setup, I will only put one speaker in front and one in the back of the car. I actually found this early seventies ball shaped speaker to put on the rear window… 🙂